Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed on artificial intelligence, space travel and the direction of technology.

On Friday, Mr. Musk showed just how little love lost there was between the two tech titans.

Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, deleted the Facebook pages of both of his companies. In doing so, he joined a growing chorus of tech leaders calling for people to abandon Mr. Zuckerberg’s social network after it allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to obtain and misuse data on 50 million users. The revelations have plunged Facebook into its worst public relations crisis in years.

As with most news in 2018, Mr. Musk’s decision started with a barrage of tweets.

The tech luminary began by criticizing Sonos, a maker of wireless speakers, which had pulled some ads from Facebook for a week.

A minute later, he replied to Brian Acton, the founder of WhatsApp, which Facebook had acquired for $19 billion several years ago. Mr. Acton, who has since left Facebook, had on Wednesday called for people to “#deletefacebook.”
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“What’s Facebook?” Mr. Musk replied to Mr. Acton. Then Mr. Musk announced he would shut down the SpaceX and Tesla pages. He said the Tesla Facebook page “looks lame anyway.”

Definitely. Looks lame anyway.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018

The posts, which sent the Twittersphere into a virtual frenzy, escalated a public feud between Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg. Mr. Musk has often urged people to be cautious of embracing technology such as artificial intelligence because of the consequences it might bring, once saying that it could become so powerful it would start wars and turn people into its “house cats.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has argued that people need to trust and embrace technology in their lives. When the Facebook chief executive was asked about Mr. Musk’s warnings around artificial intelligence during a Facebook Live broadcast in 2017, he called Mr. Musk a “naysayer.” That’s an insult in a technology world that celebrates perpetual optimism.

“With A.I. especially, I’m really optimistic,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “People who are naysayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios — I just, I don’t understand it. I think it’s really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”

In response, Mr. Musk shot back that Mr. Zuckerberg did not fully comprehend the issues.

“I’ve talked to Mark about this,” Mr. Musk wrote. “His understanding of the subject is limited.”

The two have also clashed on space travel. Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Kenya in 2016 for the launch of a Facebook-affiliated satellite called Amos-6, which was set to go to outer space in a SpaceX rocket. But the rocket exploded. Mr. Zuckerberg released a chilly statement.

“As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” he wrote on Facebook.

Mr. Musk is a frequent Twitter presence, who has posted increasingly macho and humor-focused messages including video of himself playing with a flamethrower.

He said he plans to keep using his Instagram account, which is owned by Facebook, and on which he has 6.9 million followers.

When one reporter said on Twitter that it was remarkable Mr. Musk had so much time to troll online, Mr. Musk wrote, “What, a troll, me!?”

Facebook and SpaceX didn’t immediately have a comment on Mr. Musk’s deleted pages. A Tesla spokeswoman did not have a comment beyond Mr. Musk’s tweets.

There's plenty to criticize about Elon Musk, but I think he has a good point here.

"The cry of the tormented is pain's commonest articulation, without words, without any meaning except the existence of pain itself. It pleads for mercy, and shrieks in the excess of an inability to endure."

I'm seriously considering ditching Facebook. The main thing holding me back is that its my primary means of staying in touch with a number of people I know.

I have no solutions for you, unfortunately. I suppose I was able to quit easily as I wan't as active on there as a lot of other people. Plus being able to contact a lot of other friends at various places (esp. art sites) helped.

"The cry of the tormented is pain's commonest articulation, without words, without any meaning except the existence of pain itself. It pleads for mercy, and shrieks in the excess of an inability to endure."

I'm seriously considering ditching Facebook. The main thing holding me back is that its my primary means of staying in touch with a number of people I know.

Why? Are you angry that a contractor for a political campaign you were opposed to purchased personal data from Weaselberg to target ads for his campaign campaign?

I'm angry that data was used illegitimately by fascists to spread propaganda.

Fascism, as I was taught, almost 30 years ago, is basically the hand-in-glove relationship between a gov't. ( usually authoritarian, though not necessarily ) and corporate power. How does that not describe the campaign of a sitting President utilizing the data analytics of a U.S. corporation in order to swing an election?

I'm seriously considering ditching Facebook. The main thing holding me back is that its my primary means of staying in touch with a number of people I know.

I swear to Buddy Christ, it's like people have forgotten how to fucking talk on a phone over the last fifteen years.

Really? What a fucking joke of an excuse.
The argument that people can magically stop using one of the worlds best social tools is so ludicrous I don't even know where to begin.
Ridicule Facebook all you want, but it lets me keep in touch with dozens of friends from around the world, who otherwise I'd lose touch with. Facebook is an amazing tool to setup social events, organise protests and buy stuff.

I have a Facebook account, I use it to keep in touch with people, and FB is always sending me notices to finish filling out my profile. Which I will probably never do.

You can limit the info you provide. Of course, that requires thoughtfulness and a modicum of effort, two things a lot of people on FB seem incapable of.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.

Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy

"The cry of the tormented is pain's commonest articulation, without words, without any meaning except the existence of pain itself. It pleads for mercy, and shrieks in the excess of an inability to endure."

I quit Facebook years ago because of the utterly stupid "Real Names Policy" that ended up discriminating against people with non-European sounding names and trans people who hadn't changed their information yet. I'd thought of reregistering for it, but have been putting it off for a while. Maybe I just won't.

The Daily Caller, as with the Daily Mail, is a known right wing shill piece that has also been known to distort the truth.

It's indicative that you can only find heavily conservative news sites to support your position here.

"I could while away the hours, conferrin' with the flowers, consultin' with the rain.
And my head I'd be scratchin', while my thoughts were busy hatchin', if I only had a brain!
I would not be just a nothin', my head all full of stuffin', my heart all full of pain.
I would dance and be merry, life would be would be a ding-a-derry, if I only had a brain!"

Also, the Facebook buttons on some external sites monitor your browsing habits. Privacy Badger should be able to prevent that.

In case anyone is unable to quit The Beast of Menlo Park's website for one reason or another but don't want to feed it more info.

"The cry of the tormented is pain's commonest articulation, without words, without any meaning except the existence of pain itself. It pleads for mercy, and shrieks in the excess of an inability to endure."

The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.

If anything, Facebook made it easy for Obama to do so. A former campaign director, Carol Davidsen, tweeted that "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."

This Facebook treasure trove gave Obama an unprecedented ability to reach out to nonsupporters. More important, the campaign could deliver carefully targeted campaign messages disguised as messages from friends to millions of Facebook users

This was like the biggest, coolest, "we are so much smarter than them" story out of the 2012 campaign. Everyone was giddy about just how tech savvy the Obama campaign was. From both sides, the RNC creating their own version (though not using facebook from what I can tell) to copy the effort in future elections.

There are two difference, the first being in the case of the Obama campaign the original app download was explicitly a political one. Its basically irrelevant though, because the real scandal isn't that the people who willingly and explicitly downloaded and agreed to the terms of the app had their information shared, its that their third party fiends (many times more people than app downloaders) were unknowingly volunteered up to the Obama campaign or Cambridge. I think Cambridge's bait in switch of the original app down loaders is shitty, though legal and encouraged by facebook, but the second category of user data shared (the third party friends) is orders of magnitude larger than the first.

The second one is that the Obama data set dwarfed Cambridge's.

My favorite part of all of this though, not once reported on any of the TV news I have accidentally been exposed to...

But while the Trump campaign used Cambridge Analytica during the primaries, it didn't use the information during the general election campaign, relying instead on voter data provided by the Republican National Committee, according to CBS News. It reports that "the Trump campaign had tested the RNC data, and it proved to be vastly more accurate than Cambridge Analytica's."

So this has nothing to do with the actual election, just the intra party Republican primary. That is NOT the case with Obama, who was using the exact same strategy up to election day and beyond.

The peer contacting portion of the campaign was an entirely separate initiative than the data gathering. Asking your supporters to spread your word is as old as politics itself. If you thought about it for more than five seconds though, there would be no reason to have collected the data in the first place if the entire extent of the effort was to have you contact your own friends on your own or spread generic campaign data. What would you need the information on the millions of other not-friends for in that case? Do you think they collected it for shits and giggles?

And even this effort was disingenuous, because while they were having users contact friends, they provided to those users tailored campaign materials they only knew how to craft and target because of the data they previously harvested. And they did it in a manor that would prevent you from knowing your friend provided the Obama campaign the ability to do that. They wanted the targets to think this was a grassroots effort by their friend to share general material they found organically, enlisting your "friend" to disingenuously distribute material that only existed and/or they knew to show you based in information you didn't know they had. This is far past directing things like any other Facebook or Google add via user data, this is clandestinely getting your friends to not only give up your data without permission, but then to aid and abet its exploitation by changing the presentation from overt advertising to personnel messages from trusted users. That's some Orwellian shit.

Again, Carol Davidsen, an Obama campaign director:

"Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing."

Does this sound above board to you?

This Facebook treasure trove gave Obama an unprecedented ability to reach out to nonsupporters. More important, the campaign could deliver carefully targeted campaign messages disguised as messages from friends to millions of Facebook users.

The campaign readily admitted that this subtle deception was key to their Facebook strategy.

Not only were they doing it, Facebook knew there were. Of course they did, this is exactly what they advertise to anyone who was willing to pay. You might have thought you were having a thoughtful exchange of ideas with a friend, but instead you were being pumped propaganda from a third party who had convinced your "friend" to divulge your data wittingly or unwittingly. Its essentially the date night movie scene with the one party getting lines via a ear microphone and a gaggle pickup experts in the other room all intimately familiar with personal likes and dislikes. That's being played.

I'm seriously considering ditching Facebook. The main thing holding me back is that its my primary means of staying in touch with a number of people I know.

I swear to Buddy Christ, it's like people have forgotten how to fucking talk on a phone over the last fifteen years.

Most people Back In The Day never did really keep up with dozens of people over the telephone, I suspect. It gets unwieldy.

Also, social media platforms have the advantage that you can 'park' messages for a person's later convenience more efficiently than on any other platform except physical mail, and physical mail takes long round trip times and has much higher per-message costs. You can also share references to interesting things more readily, which helps people feel some degree of commonality.

These arguments remind me of the arguments against email (you can just send printed letters), against instant messages (you can just send emails!), against data calls (the quality is worse than a regular call). I imagine similar arguments were made against the telephone.

Denying that social media reduces communication friction is ludicrous, denying that reducing friction is a good business is also ludicrous, and that encouraging communication is bad is just silly. If you want to base an argument against social media, you can talk about algorithmic exposure to other peoples posts, or the social halo effect.